Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 53-03, Section: A, page: 0807.

Adviser: Richard H. Brodhead.

The figure of the bachelor narrator is remarkably prevalent in Anglo-American fiction from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, but the significance of the literary yoking of this character type with the first-person narrative mode is hardly self-evident. This dissertation examines the gendered construction of bachelorhood as form of narrative subjectivity, tracing the relation of this figure of marginalized masculinity to the sentimental and marital ideology of Victorian fiction, and to the development of the male, high culture literary tradition known as modernism. Bachelor narrative stands in vital if vicarious relation to the heterosexual marriage plot which is a masterplot of the novel, underwriting the conventional gender and sexual roles associated with marital ideology but also subjecting these roles to scrutiny.

Chapter One discusses the generic and gendered appropriations that delineate the bachelor's narrative perspective in the 1850 American best-seller Reveries of a Bachelor, comparing it with several mid-century male-authored bachelor narratives that followed in the wake of its success, including The Blithedale Romance, and with one female-authored bachelor narrative that came several years earlier: Wuthering Heights. Chapter Two examines a variety of writings by Henry James including The Portrait of a Lady, "The Aspern Papers," "The Figure in the Carpet," and his critical commentary on Shakespeare, Byron, H. G. Wells, Conrad, and others; for James, the figure of the bachelor marks the intersection between "the artist" and "the man," but his attitude towards first-person narrative registers James's uneasiness with both the popular women writers who influenced him and the male modernists who succeeded him. Chapter Three focusses on the paradox that male feminism presents in Conrad's Under Western Eyes, particularly with respect to the narrative representation of the heroine from the bachelor's point of view. In The Good Soldier, the narrator's problematic representation of the novel's "other man" is a key site of gendered and epistemological uncertainty; Chapter Four extends this analysis to Ford's theory of Impressionism and his relation to the Vorticist movement.